Comment by the_grue

I don't buy it. This whole story makes GRU and, by extension, Putin himself look ridiculous in the eyes of their own populace. Russian-speaking Internet communities are savoring this failure in every conceivable way right now, ridiculing Putin and the Russian propaganda. And that's a major failure for Putin's regime, which is built on nationalism, on a promise of greatness, on claiming that Russia is a major world power, etc.